


The Smallest Histories, Repeating

by TheMadWires



Category: Breath of Fire II
Genre: Angst, Choices have consequences, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, no beta reader we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2020-03-20 01:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18982276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMadWires/pseuds/TheMadWires
Summary: Nina reflects on the consequences of a choice that she's made, and has been made by others before. Post-game Nina/Ryu, but not in a particularly happy way.  Short drabble written for January 4th prompt, "Just a little bit of history repeating".





	The Smallest Histories, Repeating

There was a dragon in her bed.

In a perfect world she would have had no regrets, because she was in love and love was not a regrettable thing, but they did not live in a perfect world and when she looked back at him in the silence of the night, his hair black in the darkness, black against the white pillows, she sometimes found that she had quite a few regrets knocking about inside after all.

 _I fell in love with a man who was not of our people. Can you forgive me?_ These were the words she thought about, quiet and terrible. The marriage bed of the Windian royal family was the anvil on which the entire people's future was forged, not simply in some abstract or political manner but in a real and tangible way, a blood way, a wings and bones way. It was not fair. Not that it was not fair to her, but that it was not fair to the people. Because one Windian queen long ago had taken a foreign metal to forge, they had all lost the soul of the bird inside them. Because one woman had fallen in love, Mina had died. What, then, would her people lose for this love of hers? Whose sister or brother, daughter or son, would sacrifice their life to however briefly or hollowly recapture it?

 _I forgive you_ , she had told the guardian. How could she not? Even after everything - perhaps  _because_  of everything - which had come in the wake of it, how could she give any answer but that? She stood by the window and tried to imagine what it would feel to truly fly. For the hands that pressed her swollen stomach to stretch and vanish into her wings, spreading them ever greater, ever wider, to ride the high winds. She found it beyond her conception. Even the ability to dream of flight, it seemed, had been cruelly stolen away.

There was a dragon in her bed. She wondered what their daughter would look like. Who she would grow to love.

How many more royal daughters there would be, before they forgot what it was to have wings at all.


End file.
